Crystalline Karen Tanaka

• 1Crystalline06:53
• 2Water Dance I03:27
• 3Water Dance II04:47
• 4Water Dance III03:47
• 5Northern Lights01:13
• 6Lavender Field01:52
• 7Techno Etudes02:44
• 8Techno Etudes II02:22
• 9Techno Etudes IIII03:25
• 10Child of Light - Blue Planet01:35
• 11Blue Whale01:48
• 12African Elephant00:57
• 13Child of Light - Prisms in the Forest01:13
• 14Crested Ibis02:36
• 15Red-faced Parrot01:18
• 16Crowned Eagle02:18
• 17Child of Light - Northern Lights01:43
• 18Crystalline II07:26
• Total Runtime51:24

Info for Crystalline

A glittering world of sounds - Karen Tanaka is one of the leading Japanese composers of her generation. The purity of sound, the sensuality and intensity in her music has gained her a large audience, and the release of this recording will make much of Tanaka's piano composition available on one album. Pianist Signe Bakke gives us an interesting overview of the complexity and yet the integrity of Tanaka's music as it has evolved through the twenty years of her career that this disc covers.

Crystalline I and II, which open and close this fascinating recital respectively, were written a few years apart, the latter an obvious follow-up to the first. According to the liner-notes, the title reflects the composer's intention to create a 'rendering of a cool timeless world of glittering, sparkling crystals.' The style and sonorities of Crystalline I, one of Tanaka's earlier works, give a good idea of what to expect from her piano music - detail, delicacy, consonance, timbral sculpturing, sensuality.

The 'prismatic' idea of the Crystallines recurs in the most recent of Tanaka's piano pieces, Water Dance - actually a set of three dances - which was commissioned by Norwegian pianist Signe Bakke herself, who has had a working relationship with Tanaka for some time. The 'water' element is not the musically archetypal undulation of waves or ebb and flow of tides, but more the play of light on the shimmering surface of a clear - crystalline, one may say - mountain stream.

One great service Tanaka renders art music in works like Water Dance or the Techno Etudes, is to expose the mountebankery of mainstream minimalism. Her music here is a minimalism of sorts, but so much more intelligent, more inventive, more profound than the piano music of, say, Philip Glass or Ludovico Einaudi, or a thousand anonymous Hollywood film scores. Tanaka studied at IRCAM with Tristan Murail, famed for his so-called 'spectral' music, which clearly had a strong influence on her own stated interest in the 'transformation of timbre in space, analogous to a gradual change of light refraction in crystals and prisms'.

A different side of Tanaka's pianism can be heard in the Children of Light, a set of simple but exquisite melodic miniatures written for children, both to enjoy and play - although one of them at least, African Elephant, sounds far from easy! Some of the pieces are so instantly, deliciously memorable that listeners will be amazed that this is the first time of hearing. As an educational bonus to children, there is an overall ecological theme - each piece describes the special natural beauty of or a threatened species of animal from different parts of the world. The eight varied items selected here are from a total of twenty; what a pity, on this evidence, that the rest were not recorded - there would surely have been enough space on this disc, which, though otherwise excellent in every regard, is rather brazenly on the short side.

There are two pieces in Bakke's recital with the title Northern Lights, one from the Children of Light collection, the second a stand-alone work commissioned by the Royal School of Music with Lavender Field for teaching purposes. The CD booklet gives Tanaka's instructions to learners for performing these rhythmic, succinct pieces - both of which, incidentally, were recorded by Thalia Myers on the CDs linked to above. For Lavender Field, for example, the player is told to 'imagine weaving colour and scent with sounds. The harmonic series on E flat appears and disappears into space at the end.'

In all the above works the pianist must show great finesse and sensitivity, a demand which Bakke meets with total reliability. In the curiously named Techno Etudes, on the other hand, the accent is firmly on virtuosity, particularly rhythmic speed - and again Bakke is equal to it. The music was commissioned by Japanese pianist Tomoko Mukayama, who originally asked for a work to synchronise with some pre-taped 'techno' music. Though the techno idea was thankfully dropped, the title stuck, as did the emphasis on an almost robotic drive and great velocity. This is hypnotic, primal music, and the CD notes argue the case, not altogether convincingly, that it expresses at a deep level similar ideas to the far more delicate, complex sounds of the 'crystalline' works. Quite inventively, the notes describe the particularly virtuosic first movement as sounding like 'a frenetic boogie-woogie machine that sometimes seems to get stuck'. Playing time aside, a superb release. (Byzantion, MusicWeb International)

Signe Bakke, Piano

Karen Tanaka (b. Tokyo, 1961) is acclaimed as one of the leading living composers from Japan. She has been invited as a composer in residence at many important festivals, and her music has been widely performed throughout the world by the major orchestras, ensembles, international festivals and on radio. She has composed extensively for both instrumental and electronics media. 'Her music is delicate and emotive, beautifully crafted, showing a refined ear for both detail and large organic shapes…', The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.

Karen Tanaka’s musical education began with piano lessons when she was four years old and formal composition lessons from the age of ten. After studying French literature at Aoyama Gakuin University, she studied composition with Akira Miyoshi at Toho Gakuen School of Music. During four years of study there, she won several major awards in Japan and Europe for her composition, including prizes at the Viotti and Trieste competitions and the Japan Symphony Foundation Award.

In 1986 with the aid of a French Government Scholarship she moved to Paris to study composition with Tristan Murail and work at IRCAM as an intern. In 1987 she was awarded the Gaudeamus Prize at the International Music Week in Amsterdam for her piano concerto Anamorphose. She studied with Luciano Berio in Florence in 1990-91 with funds from the Nadia Boulanger Foundation and a Japanese Government Scholarship, at the end of which time she wrote Hommage en cristal, a commission from the Ultima Festival in Oslo for the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra.

A series of important commissions from Japan, including the orchestral piece Initium (1993), Wave Mechanics (1994) and Echo Canyon (1995), confirmed her as one of the leading living composers from that country. During the same period, there were increasing performances and broadcasts around the world including the UK, USA, France, Scandinavia and five ISCM festivals. She is co-artistic director of the Yatsugatake Kogen Music Festival, previously directed by Toru Takemitsu.

Her recent works, such as The Song of Songs, Night Bird and Metal Strings, develop new directions in her musical language using the latest technology and reflecting different aspects of contemporary culture. In recent years, Karen Tanaka's love of nature and concern for the environment has influenced many of her works, including Frozen Horizon, Water and Stone and the tape piece Questions of Nature.

Booklet for Crystalline